Hans-Christian Schmid's Lichter, which at the moment is enjoying the same massive underground media buzz that's always awarded to the young director's efforts, officially concerns "two countries, two cities, one river: The Oder River not only separates the German city of Frankfurt from Slubice in Poland, it separates two different worlds from each other. Whether rich or poor, people try to seek their fortune there-- but often only find their limits."
The sound of broken dreams and misplaced hopes is nothing new to The Notwist, and Schmid presumably courted them as soundtrack artists for this very reason. The Lichter twelve-inch, the inaugural release of The Notwist's own Alien Transistor label (despite that its catalog number misleadingly reads "NO3") consists of three ultra-minimal instrumental compositions built on the haunts of piano and cello lines, interspersed with electronic fuzz and clicks, and the rhythmic augments of a zarb (a type of Eastern drum capable of differentiated tone, ergo melody as well). It also includes a modest remix of these sounds by the band's own Martin Gretschmann-- also known as heralded electropop artist Console.
For the project, the Acher brothers were asked to compose a brief instrumental soundtrack-- not a full-length Notwist release. The music is necessarily secondary to the film itself, and to this end must never upstage the dramatics or disagree with them thematically. Despite the implications of that, instrumental soundtracks don't always equal "boring." One need only recall Clint Mansell's similar effort with the soundtrack for Requiem for a Dream: a film about the fragility of the American Dream and its hopeless victims. Mansell did an expert job of mirroring the film's downward spiral, keeping more or less to the film's opening string theme throughout, but progressively imbuing it with an insistent melancholy. Each track has its own internal momentum, and taken as a whole, the Requiem soundtrack amounted to a horrifically draining experience, even when separated from the film itself.
In contrast, the Lichter soundtrack is frustratingly stagnant. The overall tenor and intensity of each of the three "Lichter" pieces is virtually the same, and moreover, so are the roles of each instrument, which drastically reduces the possibilities for sonic variation within the soundtrack's theme (if there was even intended to be one at all). On a micro-level, the compositions (save the predictable addition and subtraction of instruments that occurs in "Lichter 1") never pursue any dynamic buildup or collapse-- nor is there enough melody present in the lines to justify the mindnumbingly high number of repetitions.
Given how other-worldly this specific combination of instruments is, the soundtrack seems unusually content as background music. What results is a clumsy, self-parodying breed of made-for-TV murder mystery music, where The Young and the Restless meets X-Files. Naturally, the chances of winding up with a vaguely Martian chill and a whodunit suspense are in your favor when you've got a cello, piano and zarb interacting; I'm just surprised that these compositions never amount to anything but Martian and suspenseful, which undermines the notion of suspense entirely.
Die-hard Notwist fans might justify their purchase of Lichter for its inclusion of the Console remix, which serves as the record's obvious standout. Console's rendition avoids all the criticisms that could be made of the other "Lichter" variations. Starting off quietly with the piano and cello as would the other tracks, the remix ebbs in momentum as Console inserts echoing synth lines and a jittery backbeat to drive the track home. The remix's electronic pulse over long instrumental lines might be likened as some dark counterpart to moments on Mouse on Mars' Glam-- another autonomously fantastic instrumental soundtrack that, the Console track reminds us, Notwist's Lichter will never be. What we're left with, then, is one singular, brief revelation of genuine interest. The rest of Lichter is an impotent ghost, looking the part of terror, but emasculated by its tragic indecisiveness.
